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Cut-price technology could stop collisions
One problem with trying to build cars with anti-collision warning systems is the expense involved. Test systems have been designed, but fitting vehicles with radar and cameras to give 360-degree coverage can cost thousands of dollars.
Now researchers at Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering believe they may have come up with a low-priced solution that can achieve similar anti-collision results without the expense of installing sensing devices.
According to Professor Raja Sengupta who has been leading the research project, the answer is adapt wireless networking technology (WiFi) and turn it into an anti-collision system.
Vehicles would then be given the capacity to ascertain their exact position on the road via GPS navigational satellites and then broadcast the results to every car in the vicinity.
Such information would be broadcast every 100 milliseconds and if two vehicles were on a collision course, the drivers would be warned. Prof. Sengupta believes that with WiFi costs plunging, a WiFi early warning system for vehicles could be brought down to the "tens of dollar" range - and perhaps even a single dollar.
That would be cheap enough to have every vehicle on the roads fitted with the device. But the system is not quite ready for a market launch. "For example, data transmission protocols and error correction algorithms must be improved so that occasional missed bits of data, a given due to the speed and volume of cars on a freeway, don't result in hazardous system errors," he says.
Nonetheless, General Motors is keen enough to be funding the research and with about 90% of crashes caused by driver error or inattention; the benefits from developing a success system would be significant.
The scan also showed:
Hospital cases
Of all those who end up in an Australian hospital suffering some form of injury, 15% are there because of a transport-related crash. According to a study for the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, transport related injuries rate only second to fall injuries (35%) in causing sufficient harm to require a stay in hospital.
Over the 12-month study period, 2001-02, 48,790 people were admitted to hospital for transport injuries. The five most common reasons for the transport injuries were:
- A car colliding with another vehicle, 19%
- A motorbike colliding with an object other than another vehicle, 11%
- A car colliding with a fixed or stationary object, 10%
- A cyclist in a "non-collision" accident, 9%
- A car in a non-collision transport accident, 9%
The report says the transport injury figures are lower than reality because they do not include those who have used vehicles in self-harm or assaults. Such incidents are categorised separately. Interestingly, the number of hospital cases in the ACT and Western Australia is "significantly lower" than the national average, says the report.
Charging for life
One side benefit from road pricing could be an increase in life expectancy. At least that is what Britain's the Department for the Environment is now calculating.
It believes that if by 2020 a national system of road pricing is introduced, then the resulting reduction in private vehicle usage will so clean up the air that together with curbs on industrial emissions, average life expectancy should increase by three months.
Right now the department calculates that air pollution in Britain is shortening average life expectancy by eight months.
